Pants-of-dog wrote:I see you are once again supporting neo-liberalism.

I am? How do you figure?

And if you think plants use the same amount of oxygen through respiration as they create in photosynthesis, you are wrong.

Why the Amazon doesn’t really produce 20% of the world’s oxygen

As the news of fires raging in the Amazon spread across the world last week, so did a misleading yet oft-repeated claim about the rainforest’s importance: that it produces 20 percent of the world’s oxygen.

That claim appears in news coverage from CNN, ABC News, Sky News, and others, and in social media posts by politicians and celebrities, such as French president Emmanuel Macron, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and actor and environmentalist Leonardo di Caprio.

Some have taken it to mean that we’re at risk of jeopardizing the world’s oxygen supply. “We need O2 to survive!” former astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted last week..

However, the figure—which has earned the forest the title “lungs of the Earth”—is a gross overestimate. As several scientists have pointed out in recent days, the Amazon’s net contribution to the oxygen we breathe likely hovers around zero.

“There are a number of reasons why you would want to keep the Amazon in place, oxygen just isn’t any one of them,” remarks Earth systems scientist Michael Coe, who directs the Amazon program at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.

[...]

But that’s not the whole story. Trees don’t just exhale oxygen—they also consume it in a process known as cellular respiration, where they convert the sugars they amass during the day into energy, using oxygen to power the process. So during the night when there’s no sun around for photosynthesis, they’re net absorbers of oxygen. Malhi’s research team reckons that trees inhale a little over half the oxygen they produce this way. The rest is probably used up by the countless microbes that live in the Amazon, which inhale oxygen to break down dead organic matter of the forest.

“The net [oxygen] effect of the Amazon, or really any other biome, is around zero,” he explains.

Because of this balance between oxygen production and consumption, modern ecosystems barely budge oxygen levels in the atmosphere. Instead, the oxygen we breathe is the legacy of phytoplankton in the ocean that have over billions of years steadily accumulated oxygen that made the atmosphere breathable, explains Scott Denning, at atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University.

"only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many two or three." - Professor Walter Ricciardi, Director of the Department of Public Health

Rancid wrote:With respect to Oxygen, the bigger threat is the increasing acidity of the oceans. This would kill the plankton that makes the oxygen.

That is also incorrect.

"the oxygen we breathe is the legacy of phytoplankton in the ocean that have over billions of years steadily accumulated oxygen that made the atmosphere breathable, explains Scott Denning, at atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University.

The processes that determine how much oxygen is found in the atmosphere on average occur over vast geological timescales"

"only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many two or three." - Professor Walter Ricciardi, Director of the Department of Public Health

"the oxygen we breathe is the legacy of phytoplankton in the ocean that have over billions of years steadily accumulated oxygen that made the atmosphere breathable, explains Scott Denning, at atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University.

The processes that determine how much oxygen is found in the atmosphere on average occur over vast geological timescales"

What is incorrect? That acid can kill plankton? Or that dead plankton will not threaten the overall oxygen supply. In either case, your post above hasn't said anything to either.

Rancid wrote:What is incorrect? That acid can kill plankton? Or that dead plankton will not threaten the overall oxygen supply. In either case, your post above hasn't said anything to either.

Yeas it did. The oxygen in the atmosphere comes from stores that have accumulated over billions of years so even if all the plankton died tomorrow there would still be plenty of oxygen for thousands of years. A mass plankton die off would create a lot of other problems but lack of oxygen wouldn't be one of them.

"only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many two or three." - Professor Walter Ricciardi, Director of the Department of Public Health

Shanan Peters, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is working to understand just how it was that our lucky planet ended up with this strange surplus of oxygen. At a presentation in June, at the North American Paleontological Convention in Riverside, California, he pulled up a somewhat unusual slide.

“What would happen if we combusted every living cell on Earth?” it asked. That is, Peters wanted to know what would happen to the atmosphere if you burned down not just the Amazon, but every forest on Earth, every blade of grass, every moss and lichen-spackled patch of rock, all the flowers and bees, all the orchids and hummingbirds, all the phytoplankton, zooplankton, whales, starfish, bacteria, giraffes, hyraxes, coatimundis, oarfish, albatrosses, mushrooms, placozoans—all of it, besides the humans.

Peters pulled up the next slide. After this unthinkable planetary immolation, the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere dropped from 20.9 percent to 20.4 percent. CO2 rose from 400 parts per million to 900—less, even, than it does in the worst-case scenarios for fossil-fuel emissions by 2100. By burning every living thing on Earth.

“Virtually no change,” he said. “Generations of humans would live out their lives, breathing the air around them, probably struggling to find food, but not worried about their next breath.”

"only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many two or three." - Professor Walter Ricciardi, Director of the Department of Public Health

Sivad wrote:Yeas it did. The oxygen in the atmosphere comes from stores that have accumulated over billions of years so even if all the plankton died tomorrow there would still be plenty of oxygen for thousands of years. A mass plankton die off would create a lot of other problems but lack of oxygen wouldn't be one of them.

A mass plankton die off would be very very bad, fortunately the ocean acidification from anthropogenic carbon emissions is also greatly exaggerated over-hyped bullshit.

Howard Browman, a marine scientist for 35 years, has published a review in the ICES Journal of Marine Science of all the papers published on the subject. His verdict could hardly be more damning. The methodology used by the studies was often flawed; contrary studies suggesting that ocean acidification wasn’t a threat had sometimes had difficulty finding a publisher. There was, he said, an ‘inherent bias’ in scientific journals which predisposed them to publish ‘doom and gloom stories’.

Ocean acidification theory appears to have been fatally flawed almost from the start. In 2004, two NOAA scientists, Richard Feely and Christopher Sabine, produced a chart showing a strong correlation between rising atmospheric CO2 levels and falling oceanic pH levels. But then, just over a year ago, Mike Wallace, a hydrologist with 30 years’ experience, noticed while researching his PhD that they had omitted some key information. Their chart only started in 1988 but, as Wallace knew, there were records dating back to at least 100 years before. So why had they ignored the real-world evidence in favour of computer-modelled projections?

When Wallace plotted a chart of his own, incorporating all the available data, covering the period from 1910 to the present, his results were surprising: there has been no reduction in oceanic pH levels in the last -century.

Even if the oceans were ‘acidifying’, though, it wouldn’t be a disaster for a number of reasons — as recently outlined in a paper by Patrick Moore for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. First, marine species that calcify have survived through millions of years when CO2 was at much higher levels; second, they are more than capable of adapting — even in the short term — to environmental change; third, seawater has a large buffering capacity which prevents dramatic shifts in pH; fourth, if oceans do become warmer due to ‘climate change’, the effect will be for them to ‘outgas’ CO2, not absorb more of it.

Finally, and perhaps most damningly, Moore quotes a killer analysis conducted by Craig Idso of all the studies which have been done on the effects of reduced pH levels on marine life. The impact on calcification, metabolism, growth, fertility and survival of calcifying marine species when pH is lowered up to 0.3 units (beyond what is considered a plausible reduction this century) is beneficial, not damaging. Marine life has nothing whatsoever to fear from ocean acidification.

Given all this, you might well ask why our learned institutions, government departments and media outlets have put so much effort into pretending otherwise. Why, between 2009 and 2014, did Defra spend a whopping £12.5 million on an ocean acidification research programme when the issue could have been resolved, for next to nothing, after a few hours’ basic research?

To those of us who have been studying the global warming scare in some detail, the answer is depressingly obvious. It’s because in the last decade or so, the climate change industry has become so vast and all encompassing, employing so many people, it simply cannot be allowed to fail.

According to a report last year by Climate Change Business Journal, it’s now worth an astonishing $1.5 trillion — about the same as the online shopping industry. If the scare goes away, then all bets are off, because the entire global decarbonisation business relies on it. The wind parks, the carbon sequestration projects, the solar farms, the biomass plantations — none of these green schemes make any kind of commercial sense unless you buy into the theory that anthropogenic CO2 is catastrophically warming the planet and that radical green measures, enforced by governmental regulation, must be adopted to avert it.

It’s no coincidence that the ocean acidification narrative began in the early 2000s — just as it was beginning to dawn on the climate alarmists that global temperatures weren’t going to plan. While CO2 levels were continuing to rise, temperatures weren’t. Hence the need for a fallback position — an environmental theory which would justify the massively expensive and disruptive ongoing decarbonisation programme so assiduously championed by politicians, scientists, green campaigners and anyone making money out of the renewables business. Ocean acidification fitted the bill perfectly.

Does this prove that global warming is not a problem? No it doesn’t. What it does do is lend credence to something we much-maligned sceptics have long been saying: that in many environmental fields, the science is being abused and distorted to promote a political and financial agenda. Perhaps it’s about time our supposed ‘conspiracy theories’ were taken more seriously.

"only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many two or three." - Professor Walter Ricciardi, Director of the Department of Public Health

Can’t you see how emotive it is to call the Amazon the earths lungs? It just feeds into the whole apocalyptic thing they got going on. There is no doubt humans are trashing the planet. That is an undisputed fact imo But I doubt the global agendas being concocted to supposedly rein it in are going to do anything other than line the pockets of some smart and forward thinking people

The real problem of humanity is that we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology - Edward Wilson

Your own source contradicts your claim that the Earth is now greener because of CO2. It is greener because of reforestation and agriculture,

Money does not grow on trees. You cannot expect the West to take care of the entire world. The USA, the richest nation on Earth still depends on fossil fuel. Give it more time dude.

Yes, we have the tech and it will be put in use when the market is right for it.

So, you want the developing world to continue to pay for the pollution of the developed world.

————————

Sivad wrote:I am? How do you figure?

By supporting Bolsonaro and his neo-liberal policies of rainforest destruction.

And if you think plants use the same amount of oxygen through respiration as they create in photosynthesis, you are wrong.

Why the Amazon doesn’t really produce 20% of the world’s oxygen

As the news of fires raging in the Amazon spread across the world last week, so did a misleading yet oft-repeated claim about the rainforest’s importance: that it produces 20 percent of the world’s oxygen.

That claim appears in news coverage from CNN, ABC News, Sky News, and others, and in social media posts by politicians and celebrities, such as French president Emmanuel Macron, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and actor and environmentalist Leonardo di Caprio.

Some have taken it to mean that we’re at risk of jeopardizing the world’s oxygen supply. “We need O2 to survive!” former astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted last week..

However, the figure—which has earned the forest the title “lungs of the Earth”—is a gross overestimate. As several scientists have pointed out in recent days, the Amazon’s net contribution to the oxygen we breathe likely hovers around zero.

“There are a number of reasons why you would want to keep the Amazon in place, oxygen just isn’t any one of them,” remarks Earth systems scientist Michael Coe, who directs the Amazon program at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.

[...]

But that’s not the whole story. Trees don’t just exhale oxygen—they also consume it in a process known as cellular respiration, where they convert the sugars they amass during the day into energy, using oxygen to power the process. So during the night when there’s no sun around for photosynthesis, they’re net absorbers of oxygen. Malhi’s research team reckons that trees inhale a little over half the oxygen they produce this way. The rest is probably used up by the countless microbes that live in the Amazon, which inhale oxygen to break down dead organic matter of the forest.

“The net [oxygen] effect of the Amazon, or really any other biome, is around zero,” he explains.

Because of this balance between oxygen production and consumption, modern ecosystems barely budge oxygen levels in the atmosphere. Instead, the oxygen we breathe is the legacy of phytoplankton in the ocean that have over billions of years steadily accumulated oxygen that made the atmosphere breathable, explains Scott Denning, at atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University.

"only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many two or three." - Professor Walter Ricciardi, Director of the Department of Public Health

Pants-of-dog wrote:By arguing against any action to halt the ongoing destruction of the rainforest by neoliberals and their policies.

Where did I argue for that?

"only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many two or three." - Professor Walter Ricciardi, Director of the Department of Public Health

"only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many two or three." - Professor Walter Ricciardi, Director of the Department of Public Health

"only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many two or three." - Professor Walter Ricciardi, Director of the Department of Public Health